Price-Mars credits a novelist with putting Vodou into literature

Jean Price-Mars published an ethnographic tribute to the novelist Antoine Innocent in Conjonction in December 1953. Innocent had written Mimola in 1906, a novel about a Port-au-Prince family drawn back into the service of the lwa, at a time when the educated class in Haiti held that Vodou was a disgrace to be denied in front of foreigners. Price-Mars named him as the first Haitian writer to give the religion a place in literature. The judgement was self aware. Price-Mars had spent his own career making the same case in Ainsi parla l'oncle and elsewhere, arguing that a country whose elite despises the culture of its own majority has no ground to stand on. By 1953 that argument had won, and a version of it was being used by politicians who would soon hold the state. Naming Innocent as the ancestor gave the movement a starting date and located its origin in a novel.

The Algerian war of decolonisation ran from 1954 to 1962 and ended with the country's liberation, which is dated to 1961 in the sequence set out here. Malik Bennabi, who lived from 1905 to 1973, wrote through those years and through the earlier decades when Algeria was ruled first from Istanbul and then from Paris. His two short works on the question of ideas in the Muslim world were conceived in late 1960 and 1961 and published a decade later. He was asking why ideas go dead in the societies that hold them, and what bilingualism does to a people who think in one language and are governed in another. Anyone whose body came into the world before 1961 and lived through that war carried a different set of intellectual and political concerns from anyone who did not. Haitian writers under the American occupation had made the same observation about themselves thirty years earlier.

Several film crews recorded the re-enactment, and in the autumn of 2012 Le Glaunec found an excerpt in the archives of a Haitian and Caribbean documentation centre in Montreal. It runs a little over three minutes, is narrated in English and appears to have been made for American audiences. The narrator calls the soldiers of the indigenous army a band of patriots fighting for freedom and frames the battle as a continuation of the American war of independence and its language of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. The author reads this as an act of translation that makes the Haitian war intelligible to a foreign public by subordinating it to an earlier one. The footage shows a handful of French figures overwhelmed by hundreds of half naked fighters, a soldier of Rochambeau waving a white flag, and the horse of the actor playing Capois lying dead. It has apparently not been shown since 1954.

The second half of the 1940s was a good stretch for Haitian exports, with coffee and sisal prices rising, and the boom around the Korean war in 1950 and 1951 kept coffee high and demand for sisal strong. From late 1951 to the summer of 1952 sisal prices halved. The coffee harvest of 1953 was very small, and the following year coffee prices fell sharply. In the same year, 1954, Hurricane Hazel struck Haiti and destroyed forty percent of the coffee harvest and fifty percent of the cocoa harvest. By 1955 coffee still accounted for over sixty five percent of total export value, followed by sisal at almost sixteen percent, sugar at more than three and a half, cocoa at about the same, and essential oils at three percent. Plantation Dauphin, once the largest sisal producer in the world, gave up the crop in 1971 after synthetic fibres undercut it.